Critically examine the roles of science and technology in social change. What is your opinion on their increasing trend in ‘online’ education and teaching?

Critically examine the roles of science and technology in social change. What is your opinion on their increasing trend in ‘online’ education and teaching? (2024)

Science and technology are the most visible movers of modern social change, yet sociology’s question is directional: does technology drive society, or does society shape what technology becomes and whom it serves? The defensible answer refuses both extremes, and it is that answer which decides how to judge the rush to online teaching.

The case for technology as prime mover

  • William F. Ogburn (Social Change, 1922) gave the classic statement: material culture changes faster than adaptive culture (law, custom, belief), and the interval of maladjustment is cultural lag. Change spreads by invention, accumulation, diffusion and adjustment.
  • Karl Marx‘s hand-mill/steam-mill image is often read this way, though his actual mechanism is the contradiction between forces and relations of production — and relations are social, not technical.
  • Max Weber saw science as the engine of rationalisation and disenchantment, displacing magic as the mode of mastering the world.
  • Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) showed that science itself changes by rupture, not accumulation: anomalies, crisis, and a paradigm shift that is a conversion, not a proof.

The critique: technology is socially produced

  • Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman argue for the social shaping of technology — artefacts carry the interests and hierarchies of their makers. Robert K. Merton‘s thesis (1938) that Puritan values legitimated experimental science makes the same point about science.
  • Harry Braverman (Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974) held that technology under capitalism is designed to deskill and control, against Robert Blauner‘s optimistic inverted-U. Algorithmic management reads like Braverman: the NITI Aayog report on the gig and platform economy (2022) counted about 77 lakh gig workers, projected to reach 2.35 crore by 2029-30, largely outside standard employment protection.
  • Ulrich Beck (Risk Society, 1986) argued that advanced technology distributes manufactured risks rather than goods, forcing reflexive modernisation.
  • Distribution, not capability, decides outcomes: the Green Revolution raised output while widening class and regional disparity, since it required irrigation and capital.

Online education: an assessment

Online teaching genuinely widens access but, left to itself, reproduces the stratification it claims to dissolve.

  • The Comprehensive Modular Survey: Telecom (2025) found 91.6% of urban but 83.3% of rural households with internet access, optical fibre at 15.3% urban against 3.8% rural, and nearly half of rural respondents unable to use the internet at all.
  • ASER 2024 found that among rural 14–16-year-olds, 36.2% of boys but only 26.9% of girls owned a smartphone, and 57% used it for study against 76% for social media.
  • Access therefore turns on the household, not the device — an instance of Pierre Bourdieu‘s cultural capital, as online learning shifts supervision to families unequally equipped to supply it.
  • Against this, the gain is real: AISHE 2023-24 records a Gross Enrolment Ratio of 30 with female GER at 31.2, and open and online modes are what bring second-chance and women learners in.

Conclusion

Technology is neither an external cause nor infinitely malleable: once installed at scale it becomes an obdurate structure whose distributive effect is decided by who owns and who can use it. Online education should be judged not by reach but by Émile Durkheim‘s test — whether it still supplies the moral and collective discipline schooling exists to transmit.